You have not seen anything quite like The Young Pope before. You may not see anything similar afterwards. Its bizarre approach to common themes like parenthood and faith make it riveting even as its characters and plot occasionally falter. Sorrentino, acting as showrunner and director, finds new ways to play with viewers (and characters) in each new episode, resulting in stew of beautiful images and ideas of faith mixed with technical and literary tricks that are just weird enough to intrigue.
Lenny Belardo (Jude Law) is the Pope, the youngest in history at 47. He is an orphan, dropped at Sister Mary’s (Diane Keaton) orphanage at age 9. Voiello (Silvio Orlando), the prime minister of the Vatican, installed Lenny so he could run the church unchecked, but quickly discovers that Lenny isn’t exactly what he expected. Lenny closes off the church from the public completely, rants in his first public address about the failures of the faithful, and successfully sends the church into chaos. What follows is a strange tale of faith told through the eyes of a faithless orphan.
Sorrentino displays a mastery of tone through the entire season, as he constantly switches from power-hungry prestige television to a heartfelt meditation on faith and parenthood. Lenny is still devastated by his rejection by his parents, but that doesn’t stop him from bending the church to his every arch-conservative whim. Thus, the central conflict of the show is reflected in each of Sorrentino’s cinematic choices. He thoroughly enjoys getting a shocked laugh out of the audience and then dropping the emotional hammer with monologues about the loneliness of faith and orphanage. The theme is frisson-heavy arena rock that concludes with Jude Law winking at the camera and a statue of another pope being smashed by a meteor, yet there are constant melancholy dream sequences and flashbacks involving Lenny’s childhood. There are chillingly satisfying moments of a nearly Sorkin-esque Lenny outsmarting anyone in his wake, yet in his dreams he is always the rejected son Sister Mary saw at her gates. Sorrentino uses this conflict to link themes that wouldn’t normally mix well, creating wry observations on faith and its role in modern society through the mid-life crisis of a man with serious abandonment issues.
Lenny and Voiello engage in manipulative power games as Lenny seeks to cement his power through anonymity and arch-conservative policies, such as a bold attempt to purge pedophiles and homosexuals from the church. In episode 3, Lenny, in a conversation about God, reminds us that “absence is presence.” In the absence of God and parents in his own life, Lenny wishes to take on those roles, as evidenced later by his fascination with a guard and his wife’s child, conceived by a miracle he prayed for. Lenny does seem to see himself as God, as he performed another miracle as a teenager but still remains faithless.
However, Lenny also reveals his own humanity through his struggle with faith. In episode 5, he suggests that he has turned to the church because he can’t deal with humans, in a speech that causes an eavesdropping Voiello to stop his attempt at blackmail. This thread seems to link all of the characters, as each demonstrates an inability to deal with people that manifests itself in many different ways. In Voiello, it is in that only his love for a mentally disabled boy can drive him to compassion. In Gutierrez, it is his trauma resulting from sexual abuse he endured as a child. In Andrew Dussolier, a preacher and Lenny’s best friend since childhood, it is sex addiction and fear of the cartels in his Honduran church. Sister Mary is an orphan only happy when helping children in need.
In the last three episodes, Sorrentino finally lays out his cards, turning towards the sincere with the grace of Lenny’s robes. As Lenny begins to accept his role as well as the people in his life, he begins to use his power and eccentricity for good, particularly in a climactic speech delivered to an African church about the hypocrisy of its head, Sister Antonia (who makes deals with a warlord and steals water for herself). He pivots from this point to a discussion of the beauty of peace as Sorrentino cuts back to Lenny’s most peaceful moment as a child. I won’t spoil any further here, as it’s perhaps the most powerful scene in the whole season, but here lies the fulcrum of Lenny’s journey.
The last two episodes focus on a subplot about Gutierrez investigating a notorious pedophile in the church, with a satisfying conclusion only Lenny could pull off. As this happens, Sorrentino prepares for Lenny’s eventual confrontation with that which torments him most. The end of episode 9 finds Lenny confronting the love he may have “lost” by joining the church, but accepting it because “We have no choice. We have to find.” He is beginning to accept his losses, finally equipped to confront the loss of his parents. The finale, however, leaves us on a cliffhanger in this regard. Lenny sees his parents in the crowd as he gives a public speech and promptly has a heart attack, perhaps a segue into a second season, perhaps an leaving the question of whether Lenny can ever move beyond his lost family as an individual open-ended. He does, however, see the outline of Jesus in the clouds.
I’ll be honest, I found this image a bit tacky at first, but I understand it now. Lenny may not ever be able to confront humanity and its awful failures, but his faith gives him the strength to try.
Each character’s internal conflict is always fixed or at least concluded in a worldly sense, which suggests that their faith is an outgrowth of their personal needs and conflicts; some in ways far different than others, but nonetheless all use their faith to find ways to deal with an impossible world. Sorrentino allows characters to grow personally instead of relatively to their faith, a wise choice considering the failure of much faith-based media to grapple with the more personal side of faith. Each character’s faith is central to their being, but their unique personalities and psyches always get in the way. The contradictory natures of humanity and faith are not lost on Sorrentino, and he plays with this in each character’s respective arc.
This is not to say that the supernatural never comes into play, as Sorrentino infuses a certain magical realism through the miracles that Lenny performs, dream sequences, and some images that reside just on the edge of the explainable. This also gives it a leg up over most faith-based drama, as Sorrentino isn’t afraid to make statements on faith through subtler and richer cinematic means.
The music choices are always hilariously unexpected and a good illustration of the tone overall, such as LMFAO’s “Sexy and I Know It” over a nicely edited montage of Lenny putting on the decadent papal robes, also a nice statement on the overemphasis on appearances in the Catholic church. There are some other particular musical highlights in the conclusions of episodes 8 and 9, using a rendition of “Halo” and Flume’s “Never Be Like You” respectively to boldly sincere effect.
But what is most innovative about The Young Pope will always be its tone, pervasive inventiveness, and modern self-awareness. Sorrentino expertly combines the dry, the satirical, the awesome, and the emotional to create a truly unique view of faith and family with ambition and technical skill to spare.
Criterian 